


a matter of perspective

by Thewordlover



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015)
Genre: Adoption, Brothers, Character Study, Childhood, James Bond is an alcoholic no doubt, M/M, Minor Character Death, Other, Pre-Canon, Pseudo-Incest (adopted as young teens), Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 16:08:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5212229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thewordlover/pseuds/Thewordlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was hard to hazard a guess as to whose identity had been shorn away more by the years.<br/>--<br/>James and Franz, Bond and Blofeld, and the spaces in-between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a matter of perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a James Bond Kink Meme prompt (http://bondkink.dreamwidth.org/735.html?thread=5599#cmt5599)
> 
> This ended up going in a pretty emotional and character-driven direction, but I hope I hit enough of the general gist of the prompt to please.

When his parents had died, James had been more confused than grief-sticken, at least at first. His life at Skyfall had been consistent and more than comfortable, with his aging parents pent up love for a late-born only child heaped upon him. He had all the toys a child could use, books and trains and a starter hunting rifle for days on the moor with Dad and Kincade. His dog was a constant companion, and he always had a hearty supper with his parents, with an after dinner round of gin rummy or reading by the fireplace. The manor looked cold and stern, but the people inside were anything but.  
Then they died. James had just turned 12 the week before, and hadn’t used his new skis with Dad yet.

&&&

Mr Oberhauser had been a school friend of his father. The Oberhausen’s lived in the Austrian alps, somewhere James had only seen photos of, crinkling black and white in the old family albums. Breathtaking views, all white in winter, green in summer, full of animals and old ski lodges. He arrived at the train station just before nightfall, late November, and was enveloped in the worried hugs of strangers. Mr Oberhauser and his wife were kind people, James knew from the stories and the photos, and the darkening landscape outside the car window on the drive to their home was almost as objectively beautiful as the Scottish one he had left behind. But the grief was starting to bubble up out of his stupor, and that night he couldn’t eat the homecoming meal they prepared, only stare questioningly at their son Franz, older than him, looked just his father. James’ stomach clenched. He had looked just like his own father, now dead at the bottom of the North sea.  
After dinner, Mrs. Oberhauser offered to show James to his new room, but Franz stood up from his place at the table and said softly, “Mother, could James bunk with me? At least at first, if he doesn’t mind.”  
He cast his gaze downward, and James followed suit. Mrs Oberhauser smiled and said, “Well, I suppose it might help James acclimate.”  
James shrugged and nodded, but inside he felt relieved. The house, though smaller and with a brighter design that Skyfall, felt cold as a tomb. He insisted on helping clear the table, then followed Franz up the creaking stairs to his attic bedroom. It was all knotty wood walls and floor, with a bunkbed and framed world map covered in tagged pins. Franz turned on the desk light and motioned towards the top bunk.  
“Afraid of heights?”  
“Not a chance,” James said. Franz smiled, then grabbed James’ hand, pulling him to the windows that faced the slope behind the house.  
“Look it. Stars, maybe a billion of ‘em.”  
“Just like on the moor,” James breathed, his breath fogging the glass. He could see all the familiar constellations Mom had taught him as a young boy. Something in his throat loosed, and he was able to unclench his jaw and smile tightly in the other boy’s direction. They looked up in silence for several minutes, their shoulders brushing. James had never had a brother, even any close friends. Only after the news of their death and leaving Kincade had he felt this fact as a gaping maw. He looked up at Franz, saw his eyes twinkle in the soft light from the desk lamp.  
“Never met anyone with eyes as blue as yours,” Franz said softly. “Bright as the eggs the birds lay in their nest in the barn.”  
“They’re my mom’s eyes. Only thing I got from her.”  
“Ah. I’m sorry, really. But I’m glad you’re here, James. I never had a brother before.”  
James stepped away from the window and grabbed his suitcase to pull out his pajamas and toothbrush. It was getting late.  
“Me neither, Franz.”

&&&

His first winter with his new guardians was good. James spent days out skiing with Mr Oberhauser and Franz, or walking through the woods, starter hunting rifle carefully balanced on his shoulder. Franz’s tutor, a small man named Mr Smith, was happy to take on another student, and while Franz was several years older, and terribly bright, he was much less academically inclined than James, so they worked along together quite well. Franz’s father often left for a few days to go do business in Vienna, and then the boys would spend time with Mrs Oberhauser, birdwatching and making bread. Franz proved to a wonderful companion, quick on his feet and endlessly creative with new and unusual diversions. Whether they were sneaking onto the roof for stargazing or running with the dogs, James felt his old self coming back, happy and carefree sometimes, but with a new intensity underneath that burned.

&&&

Two years passed. The time slipped by, and suddenly James was in the center of puberty, his height rising, his muscles unspooling under tanned arms. He was long graduated from that first hunting rifle, was learning targets with Mr Oberhauser while Franz was in town studying at the library. But sometimes the boys practiced in competition. James always won, and when he did, Franz’s eyes would glint sharply, for just one moment, and then he would shake James’ hand hard and long, and the three of them would smile in the fresh mountain air.  
Mr Oberhauser was sharing his old books with James, old works from the continent and England, America, East Timor. James missed the natural warmth of sharing space with your fellow blood, but he was proud to call him stepfather.  
Franz was growing broader, but not much taller; James soon was able to glance down at his big brother. James knew this peeved Franz, but couldn’t begin to tell why. Franz was clearly superior in many things: stronger physically, faster at running, sooner to catch and fell a rabbit. Sure, James was perhaps more handsome, a better target, but wasn’t it obvious he worshipped the older boy? Franz always was the one James went to.  
It was Franz, after all, who had explained why sometimes James had queer dreams and woke with a dry mouth and sticky boxers. He told James about dances in the city with father, the tight dresses and tuxedoes all bunched together.  
“Sounds gross,” was James’ first analysis, his legs swinging off the bed where they sat together. It was just after supper on an early summer night, and the crickets were starting their nightly cacophony.  
“Oh, little brother, if only you knew,” Franz replied, laughing a little. But then the sharp light fell from his eyes and he said quietly, “But don’t feel like you have to rush. Mother didn’t meet Father until she was 22. And besides, sometimes it doesn’t feel….right with gi…with anyone. And then you can wait.”  
James felt something cold and unintelligible in his gut. Franz left the room abruptly, leaving him alone on the bottom bunk.

&&&

Then he was 15, and covered in pimples and spending all his time with Franz, because of course he was, best friend, adopted brother, hunting partner. They rushed through their lessons and spent the afternoons hiking and fishing, then James would head in for a book talk with Mr Oberhauser, or some chores, and Franz would head to the barn. James would often invite Franz in, he had sometimes read the book in snatches when James had set it down, but he always refused with a grimace.  “Don’t want to slow the geniuses of the family down,” he might say, or just wink and push James towards the backdoor. James would enter Mr Oberhauser’s study and feel the ghost of his own father, sitting by the fire in Skyfall, dog by his feet, book in hand. James would lose his breath for whole moments, and then the present would outrun the past, and he was an orphan again, albeit at least a happy one.  
It was that winter that the accident happened. They were up at the top of the mountain for a weekend in February, and James could feel the tension brewing, as sure and yet invisible as approaching storm clouds. Franz and his father had been fighting about something, maybe university, maybe a girl. Regardless, Franz was distant and seemed overly focused on his technique, something unnecessary for such a natural skiier. After lunch, Mr Oberhauser asked Franz and James if they were ready to head up the lift again  
“You two go along, I need to digest,” James said, wanting to avoid getting stuck in the middle and having to mediate again..  
James sat on the porch and sharpened his hunting knife for a bit. When the porter rushed by him with the news, James dropped his knife and felt the storm break over his head.

&&&

He went to London to finish secondary school and then off to university, English for his fathers, science and maths for the future. He drank too much and fucked women he met at pubs off-campus, his roommate’s girlfriend, maybe a TA or two. Their bodies were always warm and soft and wonderful and wrong. He remembered that glint in Franz’s eyes and went in a rush of understanding to his first gay bar and always, always wanted to kick himself or worse for not figuring it all out sooner. He made good marks and bad ones and wrote letters to Mrs Oberhauser until she died of cancer and it took more and more alcohol to sink into a happy stupor. He couldn’t remember what was wrong most nights, and that suited him just fine.  
MI6 came along and he let himself be blissfully sucked into the vortex of government secrets, endless targets and guns and free alcohol and free women and he was free, free of his old live(s).

&&&

It had been over two decades since his time in the Austrian alps, since he lost his family for a second time. Now he was Bond, James Bond, and he had been to every continent and killed on over half of them, and it was easy to forget his time with the Oberhausers, easy to forget he had once been a boy, an orphan at that. He had a new name and a 1/2, 007. It was one of the hardest and easiest jobs in the world; he was built for this.  
Madeleine was the first woman since Vesper to pull James out of his fog of work and alcohol and really make him notice, and he was grateful to her for it. She was sharp, and beautiful, and brave, and it was going to get her killed if she stayed with him, he knew this and couldn’t bring himself to care, not yet at least.  
He sat in his room in Blofeld’s lair, beautiful and urbane decor, an artificial slice taken out of the dusty desert. Franz had done quite well for himself. No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, know the target’s name. This man about to call James and Madeleine to him was hardly the boy who had once offered to share a room with James. James wondered if Blofeld knew how many nights he had spent drunk and reminiscing of Austria, if that too had been caught on SPECTRE’s cameras. He sat down on the bed and shot out the window with a finger-gun. Then he stood and straightened his suit, waited for the man who had been dead, who had been his brother, who had been his second father’s killer. James Bond wasn’t sure who he was going to meet, and who that man was going to meet, either. It was hard to hazard a guess as to whose identity had been shorn away more by the years.

&&

The recorded shot rang out, and something loosed in his chest, and James wanted to kill, for just a moment, and then they were moving on to the bright antiseptic room, and there was a screw in his skull, and he thought he might go mad after all, like Blofeld clearly had, and he looked up, teeth grit, and looked into Blofeld’s eyes, Franz’s eyes, and wanted to spit out the truth:

“I never took your father, at least I sure never meant to, you idiot. It was always you. You were my first friend. My brother. I know you were in love with me, but you were fucking dead.”

But the pain was too intense, and then everything began to happen, faster, faster, record skipping on the needle, and he was Bond again, and he wondered at the back of his mind if in some other world, if Franz had taught him the truth that night in their room, when he told James that sometimes it doesn’t work with who it’s supposed to. But the space between there and now was impossible to scale, a frozen tundra, a mountain with the dead, one real and one fake. There in that room in the crater, with metal in his brain, James knew real brothers don’t fall in obsessive love, don’t kill everyone else you hold dear, so clearly the entire situation was falsified and wrong and impossible. It was too bad, though. James Bond had himself risen from the grave a time or two, small matters of societal impropriety were hardly enough to stop him. The torture, then and for years, was, and the lies, and the way that he left it all happen, again and again and again, so Bond shut the small flutter of indecision off, and ran like hell with Madeleine away from Ernst Stavro Blofeld and all that could never be, could never have been.

**Author's Note:**

> Chinese language translation by the lovely Verhoston
> 
> http://www.movietvslash.com/thread-187284-1-1.html


End file.
